The Law of Exclusivity - #6 Law under the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
“Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect’s mind”. ‘When the competitor owns a word or position in the prospect’s mind, it is futile to attempt to use the same word’.
The law of exclusivity can actually be rechristened as ‘The Law of Word’ coz it is more focussed on getting the word associated with a brand, our brand. The word therefore has to be chosen very wisely. It is the first thing that one should think as soon as one has a business plan ready for a product or service. The word should be ideally the core of the customer need related to the product or the service that the Brand is intending to launch. Some examples that can be considered are ‘Thickness’ for Ketchup, ‘Long Lasting’ for Batteries, ‘Hungry Kya?’ for Pizzas, ‘On Time, Every Time’ for Courier or Transportation service and so on.
Researchers have identified that it takes a minimum of a month and sometimes even a year for the human brain to associate a word to a Brand based on their indulgence with the product / brand / service. It can sometimes be even as short as days depending on excessive exposure or wilfully intended associations of the brand to the word by the individual itself.
In the earlier days, the advertising was minimal compared to today. Those days, only the brands with good financial support would adopt large scale advertising and those with limited budget would focus only on small scale advertising. Advertising media were minimum compared to the traditional media, Print and electronic being the lead sources. The customers also had fewer brands to deal with and therefore higher mental bandwidth to think about the brand and a word associated with it. These days with the Digital Media in force, there are numerous brands and ads being published on various media platforms and it is therefore more unlikely for the customer to associate with the brand and the associated word faster than before.
It is not completely disheartening for the brands to focus on a word and try associating with, but it has definitely become much harder compared to the good old days. Today, if a brand wants to work on associating with a word, it has to spend significant amount of time and energy with a focussed approach. The challenge is that the customers have too many options and distractions on a daily basis. Unless of course yours is a new and innovative product or service or a first of a kind in the market or even a first comer in a segment, it is very difficult to make a lasting impact on the customer’s mind. If your brand is neither of the ones mentioned so far, then you have to be a big brand at least so that the customers can take notice of you. If none of the above are applicable, then work hard and try to bring an uniqueness into the picture so that the customers can take notice of you and start giving a small space in their mind to start with. Associating a word with it will happen depending on your persistent effort post that.
Making the first impression is considerably easy compared to ‘staying in the mind’ is concerned. One bad or unlucky event can turn the tide on things. A simple and recent example to prove the point: Volvo entered the Indian public transport market with its global brand word ‘Safety’ and succeeded in planting it into people’s mind until recently. A string of fire accidents killing almost 100 people across 5 to 6 incidents has disassociated the brand word ‘Safety’ from Volvo. The brand word ‘Safety’ is up for grabs to the next bidder in the Indian public transport market. It’s sad that none of the competitors are aware of this condition as yet. However, the Law of Exclusivity is fragile and susceptible given the current market trends with Digital Media in place. A slight miss from a competitor will open the minds of at least a few individuals where we can replace the brand association with the brand word. This can be taken as an advantage and with the support of a strong and resourceful Digital Marketing campaign, topple the brand association with the word in people’s minds over a much shorter period of time. Eventually it depends on the brand strategy of whether or not they would think it up themselves or want to bet on a Brand word which is already owned by a competitor that will only be up for grabs IF and only IF the competitor makes a recognizable mistake.
